What To Do with Old Medals and Patches

Ever since mom sent me back to Charleston with boxes of my childhood (aka lots of sports related items) I knew I had to go through them and *maybe* downsize or at least condense all my sports stuff into things to display (cue some Pinteresting and finding this awesome blogger’s ideas) and 1 box of stuff I can’t let go of yet. Once I had it all out of the boxes, I broke it into groups: volleyball, soccer, and other. Today, we take on volleyball…

Since Pegs had my state volleyball stuff framed back in high school, I didn’t have that much stuff to sort through — some medals, plaques, and patches (I didn’t do the whole HS letter jacket thing). The plaques will be a project for another day, but I decided to just make a small frame to house the other stuff that I wanted to keep, to eventually hang by my other state volleyball frame.

Displaying Medals & Patches

What you’ll need:

Framed bulletin board / cork board

Paint / paint brush

Paint tape

Pliers

Short straight pins

Medals / patches

Once I had everything I wanted to frame, I figured out a rough layout of everything, so I could guess about what size frame I would need. While I was out getting my shadowbox for a jersey, I saw this framed bulletin board (on sale) at Michael’s which was close to the dimensions I estimated, so I picked it up.

I knew I didn’t want the cork background, so I decided to paint it gray instead. After getting paint on the frame, I grabbed some painter’s tape and lined the frame, so I wouldn’t have any more messes.

Then I finished painting the cork in “steel gray.” I had a short delay while I ran to Hobby Lobby to get more paint, but besides that it only took about 20-30 minutes and 2 -3ish coats of paint to finish the board. The paint makes it look a lot more polished and grown up, than just a simple bulletin board.

While the paint was drying, I turned to the medals. I decided to remove the ribbons from them, since they’re kinda useless and I just wanted to keep the actual medal, so I used pliers to open up the ring and remove the ribbons. Since someone initially put them on that way, the rings are pretty pliable and easy to open up and slip the medal out.

Once the paint was dry, and the medals were ready, I started laying everything out to figure out the best fit. Once I was happy with the arrangement, I pinned everything in. The perks of using a bulletin board is that everything pins in super easy, so you don’t have to worry about it falling out. I used the smaller straight pins for the patches, and then larger pearl head pins (that came with the shadowbox) to attach the medals, since they are heavier and needed to stay in place. Voila — another portion of my younger years framed!

Slowly, but surely our sports stuff is ready to be hung and displayed!